Museum Secrets

Ad hoc adventure

D o you ever go to museums? Maybe you go to see a particular exhibition, perhaps you visit them when on holiday to pepper the break with ‘learning stuff about where you are’, or it could be that they are just a dusty memory of bygone school trips and packed lunches. Whenever you last went it is likely that you will be familiar with that spot on the wander around all of the exhibits where your legs have become tired, your awe fatigued and really you’re looking out for the gift shop and the chance of buying a magnet for your mum to smile over when you get home.

This is the cue for the arrival of your oasis of sanctuary. A small corner consisting of a couple of benches, a projector and narration spoken in hushed tones. This is the film bit, telling stories and showing low budget reconstructions of the tales that incorporate the wonders to come as simple props and key tokens in a fabulous odyssey. And allows your knees to recover from the slow walking and reading you’ve been doing for the last two hours.

This series is essentially a collection of those museum films. Not exactly, but still reconstructing stories around artefacts, creating wonder at their very existence, and preparing us to muster ourselves by the end of it, to gather up our juice cartons, and embark on the remainder of the visit with a renewed vigour, just on a slightly higher budget.

This first episode of the second series goes inside the Imperial War Museum in London, covering the history of Britain at war from World War I through to present day. It covers several stories including Churchill’s bunker, a London housewife who became a spy and withstood Nazi interrogators, a Nobel prize-winning physicist in a World War I trench, and how British top guns stay cool flying over Iraq with enemy missiles locked on. Reading it like that is sounds like a recruitment drive for the armed forces, but this is about the derring dos of actual people, testified to by the artefacts they left behind. Essentially, this is speaking for the value of museums as the guardians of our history – both on a personal and national level.

Next week’s episode is from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, questioning the actual facts of the minotaur myth, linen armour and actual tomb raiders. I had a sneak peak, it was good.
There’s a reason we’re curious about what it was like when our parents were young(er), and their parents, and so on. Museums don’t need to have Ben Stiller running about in the dark for their exhibits to really come alive. Just a spot of context, and if your knees hurt, sometimes we need a bit of help focussing.

Museum Secrets, Yesterday, series two, Friday 22 June 2012